Payday 2

A good variety of heists that can be tackled in different ways, along with a slick presentation make the idea of more heist games exciting. As it stands though, PAYDAY 2 is mostly just a really well constructed cooperative first person shooter. That you can love it when a plan comes together is more of a bonus.

Even though it can be played alone, it isn’t meant to be. The friendly A.I. is quick to revive you and can be quite the bullet sponge, but it can’t interact the way another player can. For instance, a job might require three bags of cash to be completed. To get the bags to the escape van a lone player would have to juggle them all the way by themself. It’s certainly playable in this way, but not necessarily ideal.

Similarly unexceptional enemy A.I. is compensated by sheer numbers. On higher difficulties enemies have more armor and health, so the real challenge becomes pulling off heists without a hitch. Whether it’s having a commanding presence over everyone in the bank or sneaking in the back and quarantining a small area keeping everyone none the wiser while you drill into the vault, succeeding with cunning is markedly more rewarding than gunning down wave after wave of fuzz.

While some heists start off smooth, they almost always devolve into a firefight. Thankfully, the pure gunplay is remarkable. The recoil is such that it gives firearms a wilder feel, and the sounds they make only enhance that. Fitting to the action are riffing guitars and pounding beats that capture the excitement of committing felonies. Each police assault wave might have been a tremendously redundant burden if it weren’t for the satisfying gunplay and lively soundtrack.

The action combining with the soundtrack is reminiscent of Hotline Miami in a way. You’re committing heinous acts to pulsating tunes. Its violence is not near as graphic, but in thinking about it too much as the body counts begin piling up into the dozens for each member your team, it becomes a bit ridiculous. However, if there weren’t so many cops coming after you, managing to avoid or even just delay the arrival of police wouldn’t have the same rewarding effect.

The mission select interface is slick. It’s a map screen, and available jobs slowly start popping up randomly like radar blips. However fanciful and slick the process may be, creating your own lobby and picking the exact mission, on the exact difficulty with the payout you want is out of your hands. It could take hours for the job you want to come up, and you might be obliged to pick heists you don’t necessarily want to do in the meantime.

Regardless, there are plenty of fun assignments to choose from, each with its own flavor. Many of them draw clear inspirations from other media. Taking after Breaking Bad, the Rats job has you cooking meth, and as added touch, using ingredients in the wrong order can blow up the lab. Other jobs offered will have you robbing gunrunners, stealing from an art museum, or breaking into FBI headquarters.

Even with a healthy number of heists, some with multiple parts, they can only last so long. Unlike competitive multiplayer where a dozen maps can last for months of serious of play, cooperative missions generally don’t survive the same scrutiny. PAYDAY 2 has some answers for this cooperative riddle. They don’t add up to solve the problem, but they do make the game stay engaging for longer than it would have otherwise.

Before each heist, assets can be purchased to make jobs easier or stealthier approaches more practical. The locations and abundance of important items as well as guard starting locations and patterns are somewhat randomized so you can’t easily game the system. Approaching heists differently or trying to bag more booty than is required can heat things up a bit too.

In addition to keeping levels fresh with randomized elements, the unlock system gives PAYDAY 2 an addictive quality fitting for a game regarding criminal deeds. There are several weapons to unlock, and some of the skills can make certain jobs a breeze. However, the experience required to advance begins to scale up a bit quickly, and playing on difficulties lower than hardest of settings becomes a waste of time if you’re trying to level up.

PAYDAY 2 makes a good first impression, and it’s one of the finest cooperative shooters around, but it’s more exciting as a showpiece of what’s to come. It surpasses its predecessor by offering viable alternative approaches to a wider range of heists. Its finer moments are those before everything goes tits up, when the safe is almost cracked. The constant stress of whether someone will hear the drill or when a civilian is going to run out the door and call the cops can make PAYDAY 2 exhilarating. It’s too bad that the thrills of each heist, all the bags of cash, drugs, gold, guns and jewels, are eventually dampened by the countless other bags you and your three partners in crime are forced to fill with the bodies of security guards and policemen.